​The Grand Dome of Abyss-6 shuddered, a low-frequency groan vibrating through the hydro-glass as the city’s financial foundations crumbled alongside its energy reserves. The Aegis Elders sat in stunned silence, their translucent skin paling further as they watched their trillion-Life-Unit ledger dissolve into a waterfall of red "Insolvent" notices.​But Prince Caspian, pinned to the marble floor by the localized gravity Dante had invoked, was not yet defeated. His youthful arrogance was a madness that even the weight of the ocean couldn't crush.​"You think a market crash can save you, surface-rat?" Caspian’s voice crackled through the sonic emitters, distorted by the immense pressure. "You’ve embarrassed me in the house of my fathers. You’ve touched the 'Key' that belongs to the Abyss. For that, there is only one audit: Total Redaction."​With a desperate, spasming movement, Caspian bit down on a high-frequency transmitter embedded in his molar.​From the dark, pressurized water outs

​The floating fortress of Aegis Alpha was a marvel of architectural arrogance. A city-sized platform held aloft by stabilizing hydro-foils, it drifted in the neutral waters of the Atlantic, serving as a beacon of the Aegis Foundation’s "benevolence." To regain face after the humiliation of the Leviathan, the Foundation had organized a "Peace Banquet." They invited the world’s newly minted "Provisional Leaders"—men and women terrified of the power vacuum—to convince them that Dante Ricci was a chaotic glitch that needed to be patched out of existence.​The Grand Dining Pavilion was a dome of reinforced crystal, where the "Owners of the Earth" sat at tables of ivory and gold. But at the very edge of the room, positioned directly over the vibrating hum of the primary engine intakes, sat a small, rickety wooden table.​This was the "Trash Table."​Dante Ricci sat there, still dressed in his matte-black suit, the obsidian "Dead-Man's Key" resting on the stained tablecloth. While the world

​The coordinates for Aegis Prime did not exist on any map of the mortal world. Hidden within the roaring currents of the Devil's Triangle, shielded by a thousand-mile-wide electromagnetic shroud, lay the "Hidden Continent." It was a land of white marble and eternal light, where the Aegis Foundation had built a paradise upon the foundations of a forgotten era.​On the battlements of the Aegis Prime Great Wall, high-ranking generals and aristocratic youths looked out at the churning sea. Their "Unpenetrable" Aegis-Shield pulsed with a steady violet hue, capable of vaporizing a nuclear fleet.​Suddenly, a tiny speck appeared on the horizon.​Through high-definition thermal lenses, the guards watched as a small, wooden rowboat drifted toward the continent’s jagged shores. There were no battleships, no Ghost Submarines, no iron-clad legion. There was only one man, rowing with a slow, rhythmic cadence that matched the beating of a heart.​"Is that... a rowboat?" General Kael, commander of t

​The Milky Way Administrative Hub, whispered of in the rim-worlds as "The Great Ledger," did not merely orbit the dormant white dwarf at its center; it consumed the star’s very essence to fuel its bureaucracy. It was a planetary-scale construct—a skeletal ring of hyper-dense alloys and shimmering data-lattices that pulsed with the rhythmic heartbeat of a trillion transactions. To the "Owners of the Stars," the high-caste merchant kings and nebula-barons, this was the holy tabernacle of commerce. To the rest of the galaxy, it was a cold, unyielding fortress of red tape that demanded a tax for every breath of recycled oxygen and a tithe for every dream dreamt within its reach.​The station’s exterior was a forest of silver towers, each one miles high, reaching into the vacuum like the grasping fingers of a miser. Between these towers, rivers of neon-blue data flowed in open conduits, carrying the fluctuating stock prices of entire star systems. A single flicker in these streams could me

The Archive Basement of the Milky Way Hub was a place where light went to die. Located beneath the gravitational plates of the main station, it was a cavernous void filled with mountains of physical paper—a relic from the "Pre-Digital Era" when the Galactic Tax Authority still demanded hard-copy receipts for every trans-dimensional transaction. For a million years, the paperwork of ten thousand civilizations had piled up in the dark, forming a dusty, suffocating labyrinth of bureaucratic forgottenness.Young Master Zephyr stood at the entrance of the vault, his face still pale from the "mop-water" soup he had been forced to consume at the luncheon. He looked at Dante with a sneer that twisted his features into a mask of pure, petty malice."Since you are such a master of the audit, Ricci," Zephyr hissed, gesturing toward the endless rows of towering shelves, "the Regional Director has decided to test your 'unconventional' skills. Here are the physical receipts for the last million yea